The Blue Suitcase

The blue suitcase isn’t something new I’ve talked about. I began mentioning it a few years back before the pandemic. Why is the blue suitcase so important to me? Why am I now, again, talking about it? The answers are simple. I strongly believe that to understand where we are today is because of the things that happened in the past. We can learn from the past and on a more personal level our own personal histories.

History has always been a huge interest of mine; among the several others I have. More specifically my own history. I began trying to understand my life at a young age. Asking myself questions is usually how many of my adventures begin. I wanted to know ‘why me?’ most of all. I wanted to understand why my life turned out the way it did. If you read my previous post: The Grief Rollercoaster, you can understand or even sympathize with why I would personally want to know this answer while so young.

My teen years were a large growth period for me, a personal enlightenment time. I had begun my religious studies. I had already begun trying to figure out who I was and attempting to get a glimpse of where I was heading. Writing was in full swing during these ages for me.

The story of this blue suitcase always interested me. My father moved us often. Every two years I was relocated, a perpetual new kid until I left home and began my own life. We lost a lot of things over the years, but this blue suitcase and a red one always came with us. The red one also contained history, but mostly from my mother’s side. It also held archival photos from my father’s time in the Vietnam War. This red suitcase disappeared over time, and I didn’t notice it had gone M.I.A. (missing in action) until just before I left home.

My father kept this item close. He had told me it had belonged to his mother. His father was in the Army and so he, my father, traveled a lot through his childhood. The contents changed sometimes, pictures or newspaper articles that had been clipped were exchanged between the red and the blue suitcase. This case is all I have left that more deeply and fully captures where I come from, my family history.

My grandmother loved clipping newspaper articles and working on the family tree. Many of her homemade family trees have rubbed away or faded with time, but some of the names are very clear. This was how families kept records before the internet and websites designed to aid in ancestry search became popular.

This item of personal historical importance came back to the foreground this year. It became part of my healing after my mother’s passing. I needed to remember the strength in my family not just the abuse. I needed to remember how incredibly strong the women of my family were and still are. We, the family members, aren’t very close on my father’s side. We prefer to stay away from each other for one reason or another. I needed to see how resilient and capable we are to see that I too have these traits.

So much happens, so much bad can happen, but we must adapt to overcome. Even those of us who don’t get along in my family are strong in our own ways. We are all survivors. We are all finders of our own path. Its contents also reminded me that if we, as human beings, do not learn from our past, we’re doomed to repeat it. If we do not teach our youths, they will undoubtedly repeat the mistakes and continue the cycles of those who came before them.

You may not have your own blue suitcase, but you can embody it. You can be the carrier of your history, you already are anyway whether you realize it or not. You might as well use it for good. For healing.